


Pierrot the clown

by letuemani, moth09



Category: Quake (Video Game)
Genre: Action, Blindness, Blood and Injury, Cyberpunk, Drama, Drug Addiction, F/F, Immortality, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Platonic Relationships, Post-Apocalypse, Regeneration
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22526143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letuemani/pseuds/letuemani, https://archiveofourown.org/users/moth09/pseuds/moth09
Summary: Anarki who tries to reach the top, Slash dealing with her drug addition, their friendship, fears and never-ending hell of Arena Eternal.
Relationships: Anarki/Xaero, Hunter/Slash





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Pierrot the clown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22426051) by [letuemani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/letuemani/pseuds/letuemani). 



> Please note that English is not the translator's native language, but they tried their best to let non-Russian speakers enjoy the work!

Slash was shouting triumphantly, raising her hand high above her head, the mad gleam in her eyes undisguised even by her dark glasses. Well, you bet! A voice from above proclaimed her the winner in a deathmatch, bringing her even closer to the next stage of the tournament.

She was one of the gladiators whose existence had been reduced to a never-ending slaughter for the amusement of those above who enjoyed watching this bloody mess. Slash didn't remember how long she'd been here, how she'd ended up here, who she was before it changed her life forever. All that was left of her was her nervousness, unrestrainedness, and love of skating. The rest of it no longer bothered her – all her thoughts narrowed to those of defeating the potential opponents. The local fighters didn't have any survival instinct, because they were mockingly reborn over and over again, depriving them even of the right to just die. They humbled themselves. They got used to that.

"It was bloody awesome, dude!" Anarki's sound module rang out suddenly in her head as she moved out of the portal and into the bright room.  
"Right? I owned the arena!" Slash responded sharply, baring her teeth in a cheeky grin.  
"That's all thanks to my support, hehe," she heard his voice in her mind again.  
"Yeah no, that's because I wasn't hampered by your annoying voice unlike always."

Slash fell with a crash on a nearby sofa, feeling the tension in her muscles gradually subside; she took off her glasses and rubbed her real hand over her eyes, glancing at Anarki, who sat on his hoverboard, one leg dangling off. No matter how sarcastic to each other they were, they got along just fine, and perhaps none of the gladiators in the world felt as close to an enemy as these two did.

"I'm so excited," the girl said with unhidden delight. "The next battle is gonna be against the local master, isn't it?"  
"Something like that. She's sure to get on your nerves."  
"She?"  
Anarki nodded. "Hunter. Didn't you know?"  
"I didn't expect to get there so fast!" Slash exclaimed in surprise. "I'm so damn cool!"  
"Make sure you don't lose your other hand."  
"Look who's talking," she leaped up to kick the other man, who easily moved away to the opposite side of the room, making a mocking noise.

An idyllic moment. They spent a lot of time together, mostly discussing their new modifications and how well they did at the coliseum. There could hardly have been any other topic of conversation, but these enhanced humans never got tired of talking about anything, stopping only to sleep a little bit.

Unlike the ugly walls of battle castles, the local environment was quite pleasant and even comfortable for keeping gladiators: everyone was entitled to their own room that had everything necessary to maintain the soldiers in good condition, as well as VR helmets that allowed them to watch the battles of their rivals. But everything had certain conditions.

"Wait," Slash came to her senses. "She? As in, a woman?"  
"Amazing, isn't it?"   
"No, I really haven't heard that a woman can be an Arena Lord!"  
There was a mixture of rapture and anger in her voice: on the one hand, she was fascinated, on the other she felt indescribable indignation and envy, because Slash could be in her place, she sure could.

"Is that anger?" the voice module taunted her brain.  
"Your worst possible idea was to sew up your own mouth," She sighed in exasperation. "And yet she..."  
"Bothers you?"  
"No, of course not! I'd say, uh... Interests."  
":)"  
"Shut up!"  
"I wasn't even talking :)"

Consisting of half of spare parts and prosthetics, Anarki has long lost his former sensitivity. VR glasses replaced reality with an impressively convincing world. The line between what was true and what was imaginary had been blurred so much that his mind no longer saw the difference. Or is it just protecting his clouded mind? In any case, Cyber-Surfer spent most of his free time in his virtual world, for which his room was equipped with a special chair to connect his built-in metal modifier in the waist to. Slash sometimes kept him company, but still was not a supporter of his hobby; despite similarity in components and love for cyberpunk, the skater preferred the real feelings over the synthetic cyber replacement.

Thanks to his predilection, Anarki began to frequently watch other gladiators, which gave him a decent advantage, allowing him to get a place as the boss of the fourth tier. The fact is that the VR system allows to watch the battlefield from the one of the combatant's point of view, but the viewer experiences all the feelings that the fighter, whom they are connected to, is sensing. The physical shell remains intact, but the feeling of being burned alive or torn to shreds feels more than realistic, because of the connection of the neural system to the virtual reality device. Many warriors dared not even touch this infernal machine, let alone wear someone else's skin. Slash looked at Anarki's chair with a hint of worry.

"It's easier for you to do these sessions, isn't it?"  
"If I may say so. Matter of habit."  
"How insane do you have to be to do this," Slash said, her face contorting in disgust, then changing to an approving grin.  
Anarki made a series of unintelligible sounds of joy.   
"Have you tried it?"  
"Tried what?"  
"The VR system, what else."  
"I don't know what confuses and irritates me more: your incessant babbling inside my head, or those stupid sounds from your sewn-up mouth!"  
"Does that mean no?"   
"I have, a couple of times, but ... it's a bad experience," she snorted, turning away. "Why?"  
"Bet you're getting mad about the duel."  
"Who, me? I'm as cool as a cucumber."

Slash slammed a metal fist against the wall.  
"Maybe a little bit, okay. I just... Ah damn, how do I express my feelings? I've just found out that I need to fight another woman! One on one! Do you understand? Of course you don't!"  
She swung at the wall again, but stopped.  
"I can't figure out how she got here. I don't know what's in her head, and worst of all, how she surpassed ME!? It's crazy!"  
"No one will stop you if you watch first. Or do you need an invitation card?"  
"Shut up! I don't want to feel death at her hands before the battle begins! I still have some self-respect, by the way!"  
"I meant to get inside HER head."   
"Wait, what."  
"You didn't think of it?"  
"Hush!"  
"I have to go," he said, patting Slash on the shoulder and turning toward the portal where the new opponent was waiting for him. "Stay quiet, okay?"  
"What?"

Anarki has long received the title of lord of the fourth tier of the arena and he often has to test those who want to go further. Despite this honorary position, he sought to get even higher: in addition to the mandatory fights on his own territory, he practiced in deathmatches in order to find new leaders like himself. Anarki was known for the swiftest reaction of all arena leaders, and the accuracy of his hits and the aggressiveness of his fighting style made him deadly to most gladiators, who wrongly considered him a weakling. He saw opponents only as objects for ridicule, counting them for nothing. All but one.

Xaero was a local legend, and although the transhumanist was skeptical of the Master's incredible abilities, there was an unease somewhere inside him that made him turn his thoughts only to him. This created problems.  
"You're a mess," the Patriot shouted, finishing off the surfer for the third time.  
Anarki let out a stifled hum. Respawning again, he quickly disappeared behind the sliding doors of the tower and, picking up the railgun, turned to the opponent.   
"I just gave you a chance to even the score, don't worry!"

Frag.   
He quickly recovered and began to play seriously. The Patriot's body was pierced through and through by the ray of the railgun, and then shattered into meat scraps – Anarki liked to amuse himself by taunting the enemies that he shot, sniggering complacently. It was unlikely that this cyber vampire could interest him, and a brief reverie would not allow him to give up the position; he quickly seized control of the fight and drunkenly led it to the obvious end.

Freak-Boy often wandered around on the fifth tier of the Arena Eternal when his own virtual space bored him or he had to wait for new faces to duel with. Big fellas like Razor and Keel naively didn't see his mechanical half-dead body as a threat and were lowering their guard, each time saying they let him win as an excuse. "Yeah, right" he thought to himself, aiming in flight at a massive silhouette in the distance. Being decrepit in such conditions is much more profitable than being a huge clumsy pile of muscles. That skeleton from the sixth tier seemed incredibly agile, but in fact it was still to be found out. He hasn't reached space yet.

***

The muffled sound of the automatic door behind seemed to confirm that Slash should not deviate from her plan. No one was around and she needed to figure out how to connect to the spectator seat before the fight started. "Ugh, less than half an hour left," she thought irritably.

The skater didn't have to fight today, so she could, with a clear conscience, ease her endless headaches and creeping withdrawal without consequences for the results of possible tournaments. The opioid languished at the bottom of the glass as she squinted at the various cables, trying to figure out what was going on.   
"Shall we get started?" Slash tried to cheer herself up and started plugging herself to wires and gadgets.

Her hands were twitching nervously, which delayed the procedure even more than she had expected. Yes, this wasn't the first time, but when she did it before there was always someone experienced watching, thus she was afraid to connect something wrong, because in the best case, she simply couldn't be a spectator, and at worst probably there will be a short circuit. It was important not to make mistakes or get confused in all these terminals. 

"Shit!"

She had completely forgotten about the long-dissolved painkillers and had already started to plug her limbs- damn, she could not reach the glass. Would have to disconnect her legs. Or, well, just one of them, because the left one was not yet attached to the "electric chair", which made things a little easier. Leaping to the table, she gulped down the contents of the glass, ignoring the obligatory recommendation to re-dilute the sediment at the bottom with another portion of water. "There's no time for that", - she returned to the chair and hastily began to connect the remaining devices, finally removing the sports glasses, replacing them with a massive visor that resembled a helmet. She managed just on time. She felt reality blurring: her vision darkened and a momentary weakness in her body paralyzed her. But then she awoke, already truly feeling herself "under the skin" of another being.

Something was clearly wrong.

Precisely. Everything cleared up in the next second: instead of any of the potentially expected opponents in front of Slash was the second tier mistress - Hunter.

She forgot to specify her visual position. The skater flinched nervously. Having no experience in such things, she had no idea how to switch sides or even disconnect from the fight before it ended. She felt a sharp pain burning through her entire body. Of course, the methadone hasn't started working yet.


	2. Chapter 2

Anarki came out of the portal after another warm-up battle and, feeling bored, setting aside his favorite hoverboard, fell on the floor. Although all sorts of sanitary procedures were handled within a regular schedule, he surprisingly managed to clutter everything with the same speed he shot his opponents. His room was littered with cans of sweet soda and strange tubes of probably every possible kind of liquid food. The surfer picked up one that didn't look completely empty, turned it over in his hands in search of an expiration date, and muttered something under his breath, tossing the tube behind his back. He often consumed all sorts of rubbish, imagining the taste of something humanly pleasant, although in fact his diet was impossibly monotonous. He stretched out on the floor, brushing away the used plastic straws lying nearby, and wondered what he could do. He had been in the arena long enough for the day, he was not hungry, and it was not fun to hang out in his private world alone. "That's right," he thought, jumping to his feet. "I need to see how she's doing.” Anarki wasn't exactly known for his caring attitude, but Slash was the only friend he shared his leisure time with, so he moved briskly to the door, jumping on the hoverboard as he did so.

Slash, on the other hand, was not doing well.  
One of the second tier fighters was up against Hunter right now, probably Bitterman or Grunt – Slash couldn't tell for sure, and that wasn't the first thing that bothered her. The supposed Bitterman had set up a real hunt, except that he hadn't bothered to do it carefully enough to avoid becoming a victim himself. The Amazon was extremely precise in using her favorite tool for torture as the lightning brought really painful sensations for its target in her skillful hands. It seemed that the war hero's opponent's countless hits were nothing to him, but the skater could hardly endure the slow roasting. She screamed, rather inside her head than for real, but it didn't matter, because space and time were merging into an abstract mass of gothic walls and endless hellish pain, forcing everything else into the background.

The most terrible of the laws of the Arena Eternal was, perhaps, that although your body is designed to maintain integrity within the limits of a conditional “life” and cannot be destroyed before you actually die, you don't really feel said integrity when you are on the verge. It seems that you are walking on broken legs, fragments of bones piercing your soft tissues, bile and blood are continuously welling up in your throat, and one of your hands is completely missing, though it seems that you are, more or less, a complete creature. In an adrenaline-fueled battle, of course, the sensations aren't that much of a hindrance, but right now, in this white room, chained to a chair both physically and mentally, Slash was in agony; her naked mind wasn't ready for such a pure dose of horror. This is worse than sleep paralysis, worse than any possible nightmare in dreams and in reality.

The door opened with a rustle as Anarki rolled quietly into the room, and he froze for a moment in surprise: not that he doubted Slash's strong spirit, but he still didn't expect her to actually decide to try out the simulator without any help. He realized that it was a mistake to encourage her to do this, seeing how his friend's body was twitching uncontrollably, and she herself was barely conscious. Anarki hurried to jump off the board and, coming closer, safely turned off the device, but he was in no rush to unplug the wires or the victim herself. Slash was breathing heavily and erratically, shivering from the shock she had just experienced, and she did not yet realize that it was all over, that what was happening was, in fact, only in her head. The skater pressed her fingers against the chair's railing as the other man removed her helmet. Although the pain from the conduit's taken damage was not real, she could clearly feel her body twisting like a wrung rag due to the defective action of the necessary substance. The panic only deepened as her mind began to clear: the side effects of neglecting her own addiction were already backfiring.  
"There..." Slash jerked her hand as soon as it was free. " There was something else... It wasn't enough, I needed to-"

Anarki grunted disapprovingly, unplugging wires from the poor girl. The skater immediately tried to slip away to reach the table, where the broken half of the pill and something that looked like a notebook were. If they were on the arena, Anarki might have been dead twice by now, but his semi-metallic body gave him the advantage of pressing the hysterical Slash to the floor with his weight; the sports glasses she'd left on the floor earlier had shattered under Anarki's foot. She couldn't think straight, and even knowing that methadone was easier to overdose on than any other opiate wouldn't be a barrier to using it again. Slash needed to get rid of these feelings, but Anarki knew it could kill her. Without thinking twice, the surfer stunned her, hitting her right in the lower jaw with his forearm, and she stopped resisting and passed out. He walked over to the table and opened the notebook to look through it: it was a rather unremarkable paper album, messily filled up almost to the end – the skater kept notes and a strict schedule of her heroin therapy; she skipped the last scheduled appointment in order to take methadone just before analysing her rival, thinking that this would help to soften the sensations. Anarki looked around: not that anyone was controlling the discipline outside the battles, but he didn't really want to attract too much attention. When he was sure that there were no possible intruders, he slung Slash over his shoulders and hurried to his room – he didn't trust the medical staff here, and God knows what measures they would have taken if they had found out about her improper use of the drug, and they had just started giving it to her individually after years of treatment. The cyberpunk laid the girl on his bunk and sat down on the floor next to her. This situation had somehow exhausted him, and he felt his body demand rest. Remotely blocking the door, he wrapped his arm around the furniture leg and leaned on his right shoulder, falling asleep.

Anarki loved dreams. He loved them because they were similar to the VR that he dreamed of not being separated from, because what else are dreams, if not an escape from the terrible reality? The present was always gray and boring for him, and before he began to connect himself more and more with the virtual world, dreams were his only joy.

And now he was standing somewhere in outer space among the flying debris that had once been a battlefield. Cosmic dust settles in the hair and clings to the skin, creating the effect of beautiful sequins or snow crystals, and both the body and the head feel light. But Anarki is not alone in this intertemporal hole – another person stands in front of him among these ruins and stares, his eyes shimmering with golden flames, but this does not cause discomfort or anxiety. On the contrary, it calms Anarki down, to some extent. He catches the faintly visible smile of his companion from a huge distance, and as the Cyber-Surfer decides that this is a friendly sign, the second person does something completely unexpected: he bows and jumps off the platform just the second later. Anarki grunts fearfully, trying not to break eye contact with the man until the last moment, which seemed to last an eternity. He rushes after him, but all the traces of his mysterious interlocutor have disappeared in this abyss, leaving no hint of his presence.

"Wake up, you idiot!" The dream was interrupted by a woman's heart-rending scream. "Why are you lying here? What the hell am I doing here?"  
It took Anarki a few seconds to figure out what was going on. Slash kept cursing and shouting something about time, and he realized that he had passed out for long enough for her to have to take the dose again. Slash hovered over him, her pupils narrowed to reveal the blue of her eyes that were shifting their focus from one object to another in alarm. Sweat on her face mingled with tears as she shook Anarki's, who was still half-asleep, shoulders. He opened the door in a hurry, and they both ran to the room on the other side of the corridor. Slash surprisingly did not hit every wall in her path with her head, because her legs did not obey her at all, but when she got there, she stumbled and fell. Her head was spinning and the nausea was unbearable. Anarki, meanwhile, brought water and threw the pill from the table into the glass. He waited until the substance was sufficiently dissolved before handing it to Slash. When she emptied the glass, he refilled it, stirring up the sediment – ignoring this, the skater paid dearly last time.

Anarki wanted to cheer her up, but he knew that her brain would probably not be able to handle the extra strain of voice signals right inside it. He helped Slash to lay down on the couch, then sat on the edge. He felt something nudge his side, barely perceptible.  
"Hey ... Thanks, man."  
He just gave a thumbs-up, gesturing that everything would be fine. Slash still felt like shit, but she got better mentally – all she had to do now was to wait for methadone to work. A little more. Just a little more.


End file.
